Upcoming Events

Cutting Edge: Workshops on Collage, Day 1

Conference, Workshop – Amy Tobin, Danae Filioti, Karen Di Franco, Andrew Wilson, Daniel Fountain, Tom Day

  • 13 October 2021
  • 2:00 – 4:30 pm
  • A workshop, as part of the multi-part conference programme 'Cutting Edge: Collage in Britain, 1945 to Now'
  • Online

The Cutting Edge workshops feature papers from early career researchers, who explore the art of collage from new and compelling perspectives. Those sessions are hosted as Zoom meetings, allowing attendees the opportunity to engage in more dynamic exchanges and group discussions. Numbers will be capped at a maximum of 50 participants for the workshops to allow for active participation and discussion using breakout rooms. Note, you do not need to be an academic to join the workshops, but should have a strong interest in collage and be willing to take an active part in discussing the papers.

14.00–14.15 Welcome by Sarah Victoria Turner (Deputy Director, Paul Mellon Centre), Elena Crippa (Curator, Modern and Contemporary British Art, Tate) and Rosie Ram (Visiting Lecturer, Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art)

Panel 1

Chaired by Amy Tobin (Lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge)

14.15–14.25 Danae Filioti (PhD Candidate, Art History, University College London), ‘Cutting the Cosmos: Liliane Lijn and Collage, 1960/9’

14.25–14.35 Karen Di Franco (Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London), ‘Breakthrough Fictioneers: Chance and Collage in Artists’ Publishing (1972–79)’

14.35–14.55 Panel 1 discussion & questions

14.55–15.25 Breakout discussion 1

15.25–15.40 Break

Panel 2

Chaired by Andrew Wilson (Independent Curator and Art Historian)

15.40–15.50 Daniel Fountain (Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture, University of Exeter), ‘Queering the Library Through Collage: The Cut-Ups of Joe Orton & Kenneth Halliwell, 1959–1962’

15.50–16.00 Tom Day (Postdoctoral Fellow / Lecturer at the Centre for American Art, Courtauld Institute of Art), ‘Jeff Keen’s Pop Cinema Collage: The Saturation of Media and the Politics of Images’ [Pre-recorded]

16.00–16.20 Panel 2 discussion & questions

16.20–16.40 Breakout discussion 2

16.40–16.45 Wrap-up

In collaboration with:


About the speakers

  • Headshot of Amy Tobin looking over her shoulder.

    Amy Tobin is a Lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge and Curator, Contemporary Programmes at Kettle's Yard. She has published her research in Tate Papers, MIRAJ, Women: A Cultural Review and Feminist Review, along with books chapters in numerous edited books. She is the co-editor of London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks 1960–1980 (Penn State University Press, 2018) with Jo Applin and Catherine Spencer and The Art of Feminism (Chronicle and Tate, 2018) with Lucy Gosling, Helena Reckitt and Hilary Robinson. For more information on publications see: https://www.hoart.cam.ac.uk/people/dr-amy-tobin. In 2019, Tobin organised exhibitions of Louise Bourgeois, Julie Mehretu and Rose Garrard, followed by a retrospective of Linder Sterling in 2020, she is currently working on exhibitions of the work of Sutapa Biswas (autumn 2021), Howardena Pindell (summer 2022) and Li Yuan-chia and the LYC Art Centre with Hammad Nasar and Sarah Victoria Turner (winter 2022–3) all at Kettle's Yard. In 2019–20 Tobin was the Terra-PMC Fellow, in 2021–2 she has a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on a new project on art and feminist sisterhood.

  • Headshot of Danae Filioti

    Danae Filioti is completing her PhD thesis titled, ‘The Relief in Relief: Constructive and Concrete Women Artists in England 1949/69’, supervised by Dr Briony Fer at UCL. Her research interests range over topics of abstraction, structural film and video histories, from the mid twentieth century. to contemporary, with a special interest in issues of text and sound. Danae has acted as a TA and coordinator of the department’s Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art.

  • Karen Di Franco is a curator and writer working within the contexts of archives and publishing, with a focus on practices that emerge between text and performance, the page, and the body. Concerned with an inter-generational dialogue with these forms, Di Franco has curated exhibitions that challenge categorisations of archive, artwork, and ephemera, which is also the focus of her PhD (2020) Embodied Iteration: Materialising the Language of Writing and Performance in Women Artists’ Publishing, 1968–1979. She is currently Programme Curator at Chelsea Space and Associate Lecturer, MA Curating and Collections, both at Chelsea College of Arts.

  • Photo of Andrew Wilson, outside, in front of a terracotta wall

    Andrew Wilson was a curator at Tate from 2006 to 2021. He was previously deputy editor of Art Monthly between 1997 and 2006. Recent exhibitions include Conceptual Art in Britain 1964–1979 (Tate Britain, 2016); David Hockney (Tate Britain; Centre Pompidou Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, 2017–18) and Patrick Heron (Tate St Ives; Turner Contemporary Margate, 2018–19). He has published extensively with a focus on art and culture of the 1960s and 1970s. He is currently preparing books on Gustav Metzger, and on Alexander Trocchi and Project Sigma. He is a founder member of the London Institute of 'Pataphysics.

  • Head and shoulders photo of Daniel Fountain, smiling

    Daniel Fountain is an artist and Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. In 2021 they were awarded a PhD from Loughborough University’s Centre for Doctoral Training in Feminism, Sexual Politics and Visual Culture for a practice-led thesis titled ‘All That Glitters Is Gold: Queering Waste through Campy Craft’. Daniel has published widely on themes of queer craft and has chapters forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality (Routledge, 2021) and Queer Print Cultures (University of Toronto Press, 2022). Funded by a Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, they are currently editing a collection titled Crafted With Pride: Queer Craft and Contemporary Activism in Britain (Intellect, 2022). More details can be found via Fountain’s website.

  • Head and shoulders photo of Tom Day in front of a plain background

    Tom Day is a historian of film and media art and American art after 1960. He is lecturer in American art at the Courtauld where he teaches BA and MA courses on post-war American art history and moving-image art. His interdisciplinary research is concerned with the moving image as both a subject and practice in modern and contemporary art with a particular focus on the role of cinema and television in the pop art movement; the history of TV art, and the New York downtown avant-garde of the 1970s and 1980s. He is currently writing a monograph on the influence of television in the East Village art scene of the 1980s, with a particular focus on the role television had in queer communities and in the foregrounding of a type of media critique anchored by ambivalence. Artists examined in the project include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gretchen Bender, Keith Haring, Ann Magnuson and Tom Rubnitz. His first book, entitled Pop Cinema, examines the relationship between experimental film and pop art and will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2022. He has previously published or has work forthcoming in ASAP/Journal, Short Film Studies and in numerous edited collections.